


Beauty is a Lover's Gift

by within_a_dream



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Adaptive sex due to injury or disability/figuring out how to get a partner off in different ways, Anal Sex, First time with a man, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, POV First Person, Pastiche, Praise Kink, Rape recovery by working through contact and intimacy issues with partner, discussion of past rape, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:48:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28888611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: I didn’t know what I expected when I kissed Simon, but it wasn’t for him to kiss back.
Relationships: Simon Barrister/Mildmay Foxe
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	Beauty is a Lover's Gift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CyclicalAngst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyclicalAngst/gifts).



> Written for tags "Adaptive sex due to injury or disability/figuring out how to get a partner off in different ways" and "Rape recovery by working through contact and intimacy issues with partner". 
> 
> Many thanks to telm_393 for betaing! (And for reading my incessant texts about Mildmay's psyche.) And to CyclicalAngst for very fun requests. (Please feel free to ask if you would like a canon primer!)

I didn’t know what I expected when I kissed Simon, but it wasn’t for him to kiss back. We were sitting together in his room with Rinaldo out for the afternoon, and he kept leaning closer to me and fluttering his eyes and if I didn’t know better, I’d think he wanted to kiss me.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think I wanted to kiss him. But I ain’t molly, and everyone could see Simon wanted Felix.

Except Simon kept up with the leaning and the fluttering, and eventually it got to the point that I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Either I was wrong and he’d deck me or tell me to fuck off or something, or I was right and he’d realize just how bad a replacement for Felix I was, and either way I’d be done with the worry. So I leaned over and kissed him.

But he kissed me back, and didn’t stop until I pulled away and mumbled out, “’M sorry.”

Simon looked at me like I had a second head. “Whatever for?”

“You can’t have wanted to kiss me, not really.”

“I can assure you, I did.” Simon put his hand on mine, his brow furrowing like he was really worried. “Did you want to?”

“I ain’t anyone’s first choice,” I said, gesturing at my face. “I know you want my brother, and you can’t have him, but I ain’t gonna be a good replacement.”

“Did you ever consider,” Simon said, the worry on his face going to a friendly kind of frustration, “that there are other reasons I might be more open about my affections for Felix, who’s had half of the Mirador as lovers, than Mildmay Foxe, a man who insists at every opportunity that he’s not molly and could snap me in half with one hand tied behind his back?”

And when you put it like that, it was pretty stupid to be jealous of Simon wanting Felix and not me, especially when I hadn’t even known I wanted him until today. (Yeah, I was pretty sure I wanted him now, although the thought still sent up little spikes of panic in me.) It still felt like a joke or something, though, Simon wanting me when he could have anyone.

“And you didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Do you want this?”

“I kissed you, didn’t I?”

“You don’t have to just go along with what I want.”

I kind of wanted to slap the concern off his face. I wasn’t a blushing babe who needed to be coddled. “I want it, all right?” I could still hear Kolkhis in my head: not going molly, are you, Milly-Fox? But fuck her. Simon had soft skin and shining eyes and he kissed like he didn’t mind my scar.

And he knew what he was doing, which was good because I was up the Sim without an oar. Not like fucking a man was completely different, fucking is fucking, but I never done someone in the arse before, and I didn’t want to fuck it up. I’d got the idea somewhere along the line that men who got fucked wanted the men doing the fucking to take control, and you’d think knowing Felix would’ve knocked that out of my head, but it was still a surprise when Simon showed me how he wanted this – rough, seemed like, with him on his knees and me driving into him. Might’ve had something to do with his hands being easily hidden like this, but given how I felt about my leg, I wasn’t gonna call him on it.

When I got my hands on his arse, my heart jumped up into my throat, and I froze. No going back from this, Milly-Fox. I could hear Kolkhis in the back of my mind, laughing that she’d been right all along, and powers, I wanted to smash her face in. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d know when she saw me next, smell it on me or something. I wasn’t hers anymore, I reminded myself, and half the Mirador already thought I was molly and fucking my brother besides.

I shook the thoughts out of my head, braced my leg against the mattress, and began to fuck him. Between the nerves and the specter of Kolkhis hanging over my shoulder, I can’t have been very good, but Simon seemed like he was enjoying himself. He was all breathy moans, but not the kind you faked to puff up someone’s ego. The kind that sounded so honest it hurt. He was tight, too, and if I wasn’t careful I wasn’t gonna last. Wouldn’t that be something, spending like a boy barely into his second septad. I took a breath and focused, getting a hand on his cock. I couldn’t brace myself as well like that, and my leg was already protesting, but Simon’s reaction was worth it.

I wasn’t used to handling someone else’s cock, but Simon made it easy to know when I was pleasing him. Kolkhis would’ve made me figure it out on my own and punished me when I got it wrong, but Simon moaned compliments when I got it right and nudged me in the right direction when I got it wrong. And when he spent, I couldn’t keep from following him right over the edge, the way he tightened around me and the things he murmured about me.

When the rush faded, my leg crumpled. I nearly fell right on Simon, ending up next to him wincing. He was gonna notice, and the thought of him seeing me weak like this made me sick.

“Your leg,” Simon said, a hangdog look on his face like he was the one who’d fucked it in the first place.

“‘S nothing.” I rubbed at the thigh. It wasn’t hardly knotted up, but I didn’t think that’d help convince Simon. “Happens all the time.”

“But it wouldn’t have happened this time if I hadn’t made you kneel like that.”

I shrugged. “You liked it that way, an’ I don’t mind.”

That didn’t help his sorrow any. “Can I help with the pain, at least?”

“Usually I rub it out, and your hands...don’t hurt yourself on my account.”

“They don’t hurt.” Simon’d mostly given up on hiding them by this point, but they twitched like he was thinking about putting them behind his back. “The fingers don’t move right, and they’re horrid to look at, but it won’t hurt.”

“You know I don’t care what your hands look like.” I smiled at him, feeling my scar stretch my face and knowing I must’ve looked a proper horror. “I look worse, anyway.”

Simon laughed a bit. “You look dashing,” he said, kissing me. “Now lie down and let me help your leg.”

Simon really had a way with his hands, and whatever stiffness he had in his fingers didn’t matter none when he was working the base of his palm into the knot in my leg. I could’ve fallen asleep like that, and almost did, until Simon decided to go and start talking again.

“You don’t need to hurt yourself to please me, Mildmay.”

“Ain’t that what sex is?” And that was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it, but I was sick to death of his sad looks and pitying comments. “I ain’t new to this, and I can handle myself.”

I looked up to see anger set in on Simon’s face. “I’d like to have words with whoever taught you that.”

I snorted. “Good luck with that. She’d eat you alive, if you ever got past her gang.” Too much. I didn’t want to think about Kolkhis, much less talk about her, and now Simon was gonna want to know everything.

“You were a kept-thief,” Simon said, only halfway a question, and I hated that he even knew what that meant. “‘She’ would be…”

“My keeper, yeah,” I growled, hoping he’d take the hint. But he kept on talking, and I wasn’t gonna walk away when I was still bare-arse naked.

“You were a child,” he said, and he didn’t have any right to sound so horrified when his fancy friends in court were the ones going down to the brothels and keeping them in business.

“I was old enough to fuck people, and old enough to kill people.”

“All right.” Simon held his hands up in a truce. “But I’m not her, Mildmay. Next time, will you let me do things my way?”

Seemed to me like this time had been his way too, but I was too captivated by that “next time” to argue. “Yeah, if it’ll get you off my back.”

Not much of a concession, but it got him happy again, and we spent the rest of the night kissing before Simon fell asleep. I watched him for a bit, the way his face relaxed and his hands lay easy instead of constantly looking for their next hiding place, before I drifted off as well.

  
  


I barely slept, Kolkhis stalking my dreams. Kept seeing myself in Simon’s arms only to realize she was watching, laughing.

“I always knew who you were, Milly-Fox,” she said, and Simon couldn’t hear her but she was all I could focus on. She laughed, and I tried to get as far away as I could without her noticing I was getting away, and I woke up whining and all curled up on the far side of the bed.

Simon was watching me, which shouldn't've upset me given how I was doing the same to him last night, but it did. “Bad dream?”

“How’d you know,” I snarled, and it made a nasty part of me real happy when he winced. But I couldn’t keep it up, the cruelty. He was too easy to poke at, and it just made me feel sick once the pleasure wore off. “We both have reason for them.”

“You were talking about her again.”

I was amazed he could even understand me. Hard enough to get people to follow along with what I said during the day, when I was trying. Didn’t really want to talk about it, but maybe Simon was right, maybe it’d make me feel better. “She used to tell me, when I wasn’t up to her standards, that I’d better not be turning molly on her. That if I was, she might as well send me off to a brothel since I wasn’t any use to her.”

I could see things coming together in his head, all the wrong way. Or maybe not the wrong way, but I didn’t want to think that Kolkhis still had her fingerprints on me that deep, and I definitely didn’t want Simon thinking that whenever he looked at me. “You know you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

She was still hanging around my life like a bad copper, but I wasn’t gonna get into that now. “You think that’s all I’m caught up on?”

“It certainly seems like that to me.” There was that hurt in his face again, but this time I didn’t much feel like backing off.

“It’s easy for you to be flaunting yourself all over the place, with your fancy clothes and your hocus tattoos. All I got is my reputation.”

“Don’t be foolish, everyone already thinks - ” And y’know, it was something that he stopped himself before he finished, but I wasn’t ready to appreciate that yet.

“Your little palace ain’t the world, you know that? And when I leave here none of what you bastards think of me will matter.” Didn’t have anything more to say after that, so I left. And when I got back to my room, I stormed right past Felix and into bed. He didn’t drag me out to lead me around the Mirador like his dog – more mercy from him than I’d expected. He was used to lovers’ quarrels, so maybe he could see it on my face.

  
  


Felix was back from whatever he’d been doing, sitting with Gideon lost in one of their silent conversations, when Simon showed up. I figured it was someone for Felix - wasn’t hardly ever someone for me – until Felix knocked on my door, and I dunno what I was expecting but it wasn’t Simon standing there with a flower, his face all red.

“I thought I should apologize,” he said. He looked different, but it took me a while to realize why – he didn’t have his hands shoved in his pockets. The apology was something, and the way he had his hands all out on display to bring me a fucking rose was something too.

“What for? I’m the one who was a bastard to you.” I’d had plenty of time to think on it, sitting in my broom cupboard of a room alone, and it really was my fault.

“Well, I started it.” He sounded like a kid fessing up to punching his little brother, and I had to laugh. “I did, Mildmay, I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

“And I shouldn’t’ve yelled back, and now I guess we’re even.” It didn’t feel like he should be back. I thought I’d blown it, and we’d just walk around pretending we didn’t know each other from now on. I took the flower, and he slid his hands back into his pockets, trying and failing for casual.

No one’d ever brought me flowers before. It was kinda nice.

“Would you care to join me for dinner tonight?” Another failure at sounding casual.

“Yeah,” I said, looking to Felix. “Unless we got other plans?”

“No, I’ll be staying in tonight.” Felix smiled at me, and I wasn’t used to him being this nice.

“There you go, then.” I nodded at Simon. “See you tonight.”

When he left, Felix turned to me, and said, “I thought you weren’t molly,” and there it was.

I mumbled, “Leave me alone,” and Gideon elbowed him hard. Felix held his hands up in an apology.

“I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s a surprise, that’s all.”

I shrugged. “Surprise to me too.”

“Well. Have a good dinner.” He turned back to Gideon, and I went back to my room, wondering what a man was supposed to wear to a dinner date.

  
  


In the end, it didn’t much matter what I wore, because it all came off soon enough anyway. I was expecting something like the last night, and my leg was already twinging in anticipation. But Simon undressed me all gentle, taking special care with my leg, and nudged me down onto the bed. I was already hard as a rock and he hadn’t hardly touched me – I dunno if it was the way his hands got all over me when he was fumbling with my clothes, or the way he treated me like I was...not fragile, because it wasn’t bad, maybe precious. Or maybe it was just that it was Simon and I still couldn’t believe he wanted me. Whatever it was, I was about ready to shoot off as soon as he touched my cock.

He didn’t, though, just knelt on the bed with his clothes only half-off and stared down at me.

“I haven’t done this since...in a while,” he said, smiling sheepishly and waving his hands a bit.

“You can do whatever you want, but if you don’t do something I might die of lust.”

Simon laughed at that. “I’m going to take you up on that. You tell me to stop if you want, but only if you actually want it, not because you feel like you need to prove something to me. Rest assured, this is what I want.”

Wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but I was willing to go along if it meant I finally got his hands on me. Well, he didn’t end up using his hands much, but that was fine by me. Simon bent down and kissed me on the lips, gentle and sweet, and I think the innocence of it got me going more than something filthier would’ve. Then he made it filthy, moving down to my neck and sucking at the skin in a way I knew would mark me up. I kinda liked the idea of that, being marked as Simon’s. (Hadn’t ever liked being marked as Kolkhis’s, but I figured that had more to do with who was doing the marking.) I felt like I should be doing something, but Simon had said to lay back and take this, and besides, he was moaning against my skin and rubbing himself off through his trousers so I figured he had things handled.

Simon still hadn’t hardly touched my cock, but I didn’t even care anymore, that’s how good he was with his mouth. He made his way down to my chest, sucking on my nipple, and I hadn’t thought it could feel so good.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured into my breastbone, and I ruined the mood a bit by laughing. Simon leaned up on his elbows, glaring at me in mock-anger. “What’s so funny about that, Mildmay Foxe?”

“I been called a lot of things, but beautiful ain’t one of them.”

“You are.” He sounded sincere enough that I let him keep on. “Your hair, and your laugh, and the way you blush all the way down when I compliment you. And your face – shush, I mean it. Your eyes light up so beautifully when you’re passionate, and your nose wrinkles when you laugh, and I could look at you for hours.”

I still wasn’t so sure about this ‘beautiful’ thing, but the way he said it, he near talked me into believing.

And listen, not arguing got his mouth on my cock, and I’d go along with a lot of things for that. Simon got me right up to the brink (I swear to fuck that man’s tongue was enchanted) and then he pulled off and I was near ready to die.

“Shh,” he said to my groan of protest. “Do you want to fuck me?”

I did, I really fucking did, but I didn’t think my leg could hold up to it. But he pressed me back down to the bed when I tried to sit up and test it.

“You don’t need to move. Just help me get ready.”

And oh, I started to get the picture of where this was going. I’d wanted to get my fingers back inside him ever since I saw what it did to him, and this time was even better. Simon bit at his lip, and his face went red, and he pushed back down on my hand like he’d never wanted anything more than this. Then he slid onto me and powers, I wasn’t gonna last long.

Simon must’ve noticed, because he leaned down and whispered, “You don’t have to hold back.” He pulled my hand up to his chest, and he’d spent already, all over his fancy shirt, and I hadn’t even noticed.

That did it for me, thinking of Simon working himself out of his trousers and getting himself off, all because of me. I spent, grabbing onto Simon’s hips like he was the only thing keeping me from sinking, and he moved to lay across my chest. We were a mess, but I didn’t want to move, and he didn’t either.

“I wish we’d met before,” Simon said. “I would have liked to touch you more.”

“Love, you’re better with your mouth than anyone else is with two hands.” I worried I shouldn't've said that, but Simon laughed.

“And you know I like you perfectly well like this, without any grand gestures or pounding me into the mattress.”

A few days ago, I wouldn’t’ve believed him. But tonight, I did.


End file.
